If Cameron Crowe and Nancy Wilson Can’t Stay Married, Who Can?

Cameron Crowe and Nancy Wilson are divorcing? This should send a jolt of dread through the community of musicians, journalists, publicists, managers; any of us who’ve pledged some of our souls to rock ‘n’ roll and worried about it ever since. For arrested adolescents, that marriage was the north star; something to follow in hope of one day finding true companionship amongst the trash, the volume, the “acid, booze, and ass, needles, guns, and grass,” as Joni Mitchell sang. For all the sneering and posturing, most rockers are closet idealists and romantics who also want to be “complete.” The harder the nihilism, the deeper the need for a happy ending. I don’t know Cameron Crowe. I once sent an interview request to him via a second party for a book I was writing on David Bowie. I don’t know Nancy Wilson, even though, as a child of the 70s, I heard “Barracuda,” “Magic Man,” and “Crazy On You” constantly: at the beach, the pizza place, the transistor radio in the bathroom. And I don’t know the circumstances of their split, which was made public on September 23. “Irreconcilable differences,” was the formal cause. The ramifications, on the other hand, I know well: it’s the strongest piece of evidence yet that us rock people simply cannot mate for life. Eric Clapton is no longer with the woman he wrote “Layla” for! Can you imagine not being able to reconcile a difference with someone who inspired you to write “Layla”? “Look at the Stones,” Bill Wyman once observed to their fanzine editor Bill German in the early 80s, two decades into their career. (German recounts this is his memoir Under Their Thumb.) “There’s only one of us who’s with the same woman he was with in ’64 and that’s Charlie.” (At the time, Wyman was ending a relationship with Astrid Lundstrom, his partner since the late 60s; by the decade’s close, he’d take a teenage bride, Mandy Smith, whose mother, would later become engaged to Wyman’s grown son.) Rock ‘n’ roll. It’s true, Watts and his wife Shirley have been married for 46 years, but this union is hardly north star material. He’s too stone-faced, too far behind the kit, too impenetrable even in ’65 (see Peter Whitehead’s tour documentary Charlie is My Darling) and certainly now, as the silver-haired mummy of jazz cool. You can’t imagine Charlie and Shirley in the kitchen splitting the Sunday Times. But it’s painfully easy to picture Cameron working on his scripts, while Nancy was playing guitar. They’d run things by each other and provide constructive criticism. Then they’d pull out an old LP—Astral Weeks, or Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, orQuadrophenia, or side one of Led Zeppelin IV—stare at it reverently then place the platter on the turntable and exchange a knowing smile as the crackle warmed the room. “I wanna date a musician,” Jack Black says while watching Lisa Bonet cover Peter Frampton in the film adaptation of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. “I wanna live with a musician,’ John Cusack replies. “She’d write songs at home and ask me what I thought of them and maybe even include one of our little private jokes in the liner notes.”

We’re invested in this union, largely because of Crowe’s own power as a romantic. Crowe and Wilson were married in the summer of 1986, when she was by far the bigger star having just released a No. 1, self-titled album and single (“These Dreams”). But with 1989’s Say Anything, Crowe embarked on his now timeless high-romance trilogy, continuing with 1992’s Singles (a film about Gen X-ers in Seattle which managed to banish cynicism completely) and of course perhaps the most romantic color film of all time, 1996’s Jerry Maguire. As with Woody Allen and John Hughes, we read Crowe into his characters and needed him to be a certain way: broad-faced, boyish, optimistic, in control of his own emotions but crucially empathetic to those who aren’t—a rock ‘n’ roll older brother. Almost Famous, released in 2000, strengthened the illusion that we knew this guy. Crowe dappled rock ‘n’ roll with a little sun without blanching out its power; no small feat. Crowe and Wilson collaborated on co-writing “Fever Dog” and the other original songs that Stillwater perform on film. As if things couldn’t be more idyllic, that same year, they became the parents of twins.

But in his 40s, Crowe’s film work grew darker. I’ve seen Vanilla Sky four times (it’s one of those movies that catches you mid flip on cable and manages to hold you there). I still can’t decide if it’s a masterpiece or a mess, but it certainly isn’t sunny. Elizabethtown is all about burying the father (and Kirsten Dunst taking instamatic photos with her hand), and actually contains a scene where Orlando Bloom constructs a suicide machine out of an exercise bike and a chef’s knife. Following that critical and commercial fiasco, Crowe was attached to direct Deep Tiki, another purported romance involving Ben Stiller, Reese Witherspoon, and a volcano sacrifice. It seemed like his inner Mike Damone was vanquishing his Mark Ratner, just when we needed him more than ever. Times could not be more right for some sun and an aphoristic bit of dialogue that cuts to the heart like good Springsteen (certainly another north star contender, thanks to his relationship with Patti Scialfa).

Crowe is also attached to a 20th anniversary documentary on Pearl Jam, who he’d profiled about for Rolling Stone, and featured in Singles. One cannot imagine a Crowe/Wilson split as anything but amicable, and maybe they will reconcile, but if they don’t it’s entirely possible that Crowe’s relationship with Pearl Jam will now last longer than his relationship with his wife. Rock ‘n’ roll never forgets, Bob Seger once promised, and it’s a comfort to know that there are always albums under the bed that will love and inspire us unconditionally but a certain kind of rock and roller’s dream ends with the end of this celebrity marriage. That we can find, amidst the haze, and keep, amidst, well, everything, another person who can make us feel the same way that those records do. When Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon split, I rolled my eyes as some of my actor friends fretted loudly over their cigarettes and maple-syrup-cleanse lemonades. Now, I completely understand.